NOAA admits faulty, too-warm readings at Reagan National – but will leave them in the records

[Ed. – Bummer. The faulty readings should at least be asterisked, or better yet, flushed entirely. Not surprising, but still a bummer.]

When confronted with an obviously broken weather station that was reading way too hot, they replaced the faulty sensor — but refused to adjust the bad readings it had already taken. And when dealing with “the pause” in global surface temperatures that is in its 19th year, the agency threw away satellite-sensed sea-surface temperatures, substituting questionable data that showed no pause. …

Temperatures at National are almost always higher than those at Dulles, 19 miles away. That’s because of the well-known urban warming effect, as well as an elevation difference of 300 feet. But the weather systems that determine monthly average temperature are, in general, far too large for there to be any significant difference in the departure from average at two stations as close together as Reagan and Dulles. Monthly data from recent decades bear this out — until, all at once, in January 2014 and every month thereafter, the departure from average at National was greater than that at Dulles. …

Earlier this month, I sent my findings to Jason Samenow, a terrific forecaster who runs the Washington Post‘s weather blog, Capital Weather Gang. He and his crew verified what I found and wrote up their version, giving due credit and adding other evidence that something was very wrong at National. And, in remarkably quick action for a government agency, the National Weather Service swapped out the sensor within a week and found that the old one was reading 1.7 degrees too high. Close enough to 2.1, the observed difference.

But the National Weather Service told the Capital Weather Gang that there will be no corrections, despite the fact that the disparity suddenly began 19 months ago and varied little once it began. It said correcting for the error wouldn’t be “scientifically defensible.”

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